E-commerce: 10 Ways to Optimize & Scale with Facebook Ads

Advertising on Facebook is one story. Optimizing your advertising and getting an amazing return is a totally different one.

In our line of work, we audit ad accounts and digital campaigns every day for brands and e-commerce. And I’m AMAZED at how many websites - including established companies and businesses with millions of revenues every year - failed to install the most basic tool correctly: the Facebook Pixel.

I’m not saying that Facebook Advertising is the best channel for every e-commerce business or brand out there;

I’m just saying Facebook could potentially be your most profitable sales machine - if used correctly - and the least you can do is to track the actions customers are taking on your website for later optimization.

After all, there are over 2 billion monthly active users on Facebook (plus 800 million on Instagram), along with a wealth of demographic, interest and behavior information up for grabs.

👉🏻If you dilute your ad spend across campaigns that are not structured properly, you don’t have a funnel, which means you’re not channeling your customers and potential customers to maximize your sales consistently.

👉🏻If you fail to constantly improve and maintain your Facebook campaigns, chances are that your results will start declining pretty fast. And if you want to achieve a higher campaign ROI, lower your advertising costs and increase the number of conversions, you definitely need to better understand the tools you have at your disposal to optimize and scale your sales and customer base.

So I’m gonna share a few ways to optimize and scale Facebook Ad campaigns for your e-commerce business or brand, and make the most of Facebook Advertising.

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1. Increase the Average Order Value (AOV)

The amount of $$ a customer spends on every order matters, whether that’s a first time shopper or a returning customer. Many times, an e-commerce store with a low AOV (less than $40) can struggle in reaching a good Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) and ROI overall.

Of course that are other variables that impact your advertising performance, but you should always work to bring that value up.

How?

You can sell more units of the same product offering an incentive like a small discount or free shipping on two units or more; this works well with single product e-commerce.

For multi-catalog e-commerce, such as fashion, beauty and special gear, you have a few more options; like highlighting complementary products, special bundles or coupons on refills and offering similar incentives at checkout.

If you work with Shopify, leverage their apps to let the system upsell for you, personalize the offer or show similar product suggestions (see Bold Upsell, Sales Pop, or the most popular product suggestion widgets).

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2. Retargeting (duh!)

Did you know you could be missing out on 20% of revenues or more just from people that abandoned the cart?

On average between 60% and 80% of customers drop off after adding products to cart. Again, that can happen for many reasons, but before scrambling to identify a solution, at the very least you should have a system in place to effectively reclaim those sales. That includes email marketing of course, but Facebook retargeting is extremely useful as you can establish a specific window - Facebook calls them sequences for abandoned cart - and automatically retarget users who added to cart but didn’t purchase, let’s say between 1 and 10 days ago.

In a similar ways, you should be retargeting your previous and current customers, because they will convert much faster than any cold audience.

Retargeting is your gold ticket to achieve consistent scalable sales.

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3. Leverage high value Lookalike audiences

You may have created Lookalike audiences already, in order to target people that resemble your customer base. What you’re doing is essentially creating a cold audience from a specific subset of the traffic that’s hitting your website.

BUT when your Lookalike audiences are based on people who have visited your website or even added to cart, you’re not focusing on audiences that showed an actual intent to purchase. So try to go after high-intent groups instead, and once you have enough data, create Lookalikes based on users that are lower down in the funnel like:

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We find that DPA ads have a high conversion rate, because they automatically promote the most relevant items from your product catalog, tailored to the user’s interests or behaviors.

Take the travel niche. You could promote a specific itinerary to people who want to travel. Whether someone is ready to book a trip or is just looking for travel inspiration, DPA matches their intent with items from your travel catalog. If they were browsing hotels but didn't make a reservation - or if they were looking at flights but didn't book a trip - dynamic ads will show them relevant ads based on their specific dates, destinations and other trip details. In e-commerce, users would be shown items they’ve viewed or showed an interest for.

You can then take the next step, further analyzing the performance of your DPA ads and identifying what products or categories performed best within a certain audience and cost per result. Just use that information to maximize conversions!

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5. Customize your funnel around your product type

What’s your price point? Your Average Order Value (AOV)? The type of product? The key demographics your going after? For instance, a low price product or a website with a low AOV will need a much simpler and shorter funnel. This means less steps for the user before final purchase and more direct campaigns/calls-to-action.

6. Scale your winning campaigns - but gradually!

Be ready to spend enough on individual ad sets before you think Facebook ads isn’t working.

Make sure you’re directing enough and consistent traffic to your website before you think your ads are not converting.

Be ready to scale up for incremental returns. Do you have successful campaigns that are showing promising stats? Cost per Click, Cost per Purchase, Click Through Rate, overall engagement… but not too fast or you run the risk to burn your budget. We suggest to increase your budget at Ad Set level by 10%-15% every day until you reach your sweet spot.

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7. Know your audiences, check their “temperature”

Understand where different audiences are within the steps of your funnel. Check their temperature: are they cold, warm, hot? Target cold audiences at Top of Funnel with engaging content, introductory messaging and reviews from other customers; target warm - who showed interest or engagement - and hot - previous or potential customers - as you get lower in the funnel, with more direct calls-to-action. Make sure you differentiate between impulse one-time purchasers vs. returning customers, adjusting your approach and messaging if you identify a marked split.

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8. Use vanity metrics at your advantage

Likes and engagement can be just vanity metrics if not used as part of a comprehensive strategy. Run engagement, video views and Page Likes campaigns for a purpose:

To build social proof: people like - and buy - what’s popular.

To build reviews and awareness for your brand

To generate substantial audiences for later retargeting down the funnel: Page fans, people who engaged with ads and content, video views, etc.

If you’re investing heavily in Influencers Marketing and rock it on Instagram, the good news is that you’re ahead of the curve having built a strong community of supporters and advocates that legitimate your brand and products; you most likely have Google Ads in place and a profitable business selling online and through partner retailers, because your brand is established and known to your target demographic. The bad news is that you’re probably missing out on huge revenues just because you don’t have the proper system in place to trigger and capture additional sales volumes through one of the most powerful advertising platforms available.